KANSAS CITY, Mo. The former manager of the Veterans Administration branch of The Credit Union of Leavenworth was sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay almost $330,000 restitution for stealing funds from members she had personally befriended.
Carla Welborn, who worked the VA branch with her son, targeted the accounts of members she knew were not receiving monthly balance statements or those who lived out of town, were ill or near death by siphoning funds from their accounts. When a member asked for a written statement, she would send them falsified records. She kept track of all of the embezzled funds in a handwritten ledger.
Eventually Welborn began stealing cash directly from the credit unions’ vault, often telling her son, who was supposed to conduct a second cash tally, the cash was already counted and need not be checked.
An audit finally discovered Welborn had stolen $304,000 from 23 members’ accounts between January 2009 and January 2012.
Welborn pleaded guilty last November to the single count of embezzlement from a credit union.
